Dracula Lives (3 page)

“Not as deep as yours, obviously, but yes. Very.”

“Do go on.”

“I idolized my father and had always wanted to do something with that love of the genre that he had instilled in me, something that would make him proud. I majored in film in college, thinking I might become the next great horror director. I made a few short student films, won a couple local awards, but never pursued it. Watching movies and critiquing them appealed more to the analytical nature I had also gotten from him. So I concentrated on the film study courses, with some vague idea that I might become a critic or cinema scholar.

“But—there’s always a ‘but’ in life, isn’t there?—as I got deeper into the study of horror movies, I became fascinated by the legends the monsters were based on, to the point where I ended up pursuing a second major in folklore.

“I was having a good career as a college professor, teaching courses on the horror film, writing for various film magazines, spending most of my summers tracking down one legend or another. My father was still teaching at Maryland when I became a part of the faculty. Our minds thought so much alike that we always had to get together before planning our courses for the next semester, to make sure we didn’t both end up teaching the same thing. With my background in folklore, I always taught the Ray Harryhausen course, since he used those stories from Greek Mythology.”

“I knew Ray Harryhausen’s mentor. Willis O’Brien. Tod got me in to see him when O’Brien was working on
King Kong.
He showed me how he did his stop-motion technique.”

Quinn was much more interested in hearing those kinds of behind-the-scenes stories—from what had to be the only person still alive to tell them—than in talking about himself, but he understood the desire of a recluse to get to know the stranger he had risked inviting into his home. As much as he wanted to take Markov’s fascinating tidbit about Willis O’Brien and run with it, he needed to finish his story.

As though reading his mind, Markov said, “Please—continue.”

“You asked if I believed in monsters. No, I don’t, but I’ve become fascinated by humanity’s obsession with them, going back to Beowulf and Grendel and beyond, to the oral traditions when the tales first got told around the campfire. Why did we invent monsters for all the ills that plague us? Why have we been drawn to scary stories from the very beginning, like Poe’s Imp of the Perverse? Why do we like to be scared? There have been a lot of attempts to explain it, but no one really knows.

“I put together a graduate course that was my attempt to shed some light on the subject:
Monsters and Why We Need Them
. My research led me to write a book with the same title. The book did well and the course was extremely popular. They both traced the evolution of monsters from their origins in folklore to the present day. In the graduate course, I had the added advantage of being able to have lively discussions of books that had played a part, and screenings of horror movies that had done the same. I had an entire two-week unit devoted to the mythology of vampires—which means, by the way, that I’ve watched and discussed
Dracula
many, many times.”

“It sounds as though your Dracula—would
obsession
be too strong a word?—might be second only to mine.”

“No, it wouldn’t be, and yes, you’re probably right.”

“Are you still teaching?”

“No. My studies had led me down an unexpected path: investigating the belief among a growing segment of the population that these creatures are
real
. That unnameable monsters lurk in all the hidden realms on earth. What I have dubbed the Shadowland. The belief has become so widespread that it has spawned countless TV shows documenting the search for these creatures. A field of pseudoscience has developed to explore it.”

“Cryptozoology,” Markov said.

“Yes. Every place on earth has legends about creatures living in its uncharted regions. Mothman, Bigfoot, Wolf Men, vampires, creatures from the deep. But the line between legend and reality has always been blurred. Has it all been superstition? Were these all the fanciful tales of writers, the wild imaginings of unenlightened explorers, or …
were
there dragons? Was there a Grendel? A Cyclops? Were there night prowlers and shadow creatures from another dimension? Finding those answers has become my life’s work.”

“It is a subject in which I, too, have a great interest,” Markov said.

“In any case, over the years I’ve watched creatures of superstition and legend and fiction evolve into becoming accepted as real beings. In some cases more than accepted. Admired. Worshipped. Facebook pages devoted to vampires, werewolves, demons. In the worst cases, it has led to bondage, torture, killing. An unmistakable trend has developed in our society. More and more, people have been acting out the horror they see in books and movies. Particularly movies, where seeing and hearing the horror can affect us far more profoundly than printed words on a page.”

“Movie horror bleeding into real life,” Markov observed.

“Aptly put.” Quinn inwardly winced at the memory of how his father had died.

“Another concept with which I am very familiar,” Markov said.

What did that mean?
Again Quinn stifled the urge to respond, not wanting to derail the conversation. “In my case,” he continued, “the unanticipated outcome of all that research was my realization that I had opened a Pandora’s Box. In this day of social media, out there in the vast unpoliced regions of cyberspace, virtual cults have been developing. A parallel universe, where a love of horror stories has mutated into monster worship. Admiring conversations in chat rooms about the darkest aspects of humanity. The deeper you dig, the darker it gets. It goes from talking to doing. Groups believing they
are
these creatures, emulating them, engaging in their practices.”

Markov’s gaze narrowed. “Such as?”

“You find grave robbers. Ghouls. Zombies. Flesh eaters. Blood drinkers. Sex with corpses. Then, in the comments, people saying how funny they find it all.”

Markov’s gaze became more penetrating. “We shall indeed have much to discuss. As one who has spent his life creating movie monsters, and collecting them in my Chamber of Horrors, I am all too familiar with the influence of movies on human behavior.”

Creating movie monsters? Chamber of Horrors?
Markov’s comments screamed for responses, and Quinn had come to the point in his story where he’d be happy to change the subject. “I’m eager to have those discussions,” he said, “but if you’d like me to go on, this is the point in my rather long-winded tale where, as you so aptly put it, movie horror bleeds into real life.”

“I do not find your tale long-winded at all. I am finding it most interesting, especially since your life seems to have many parallels to mine. And—you may already know this—but it has taken me a very long life to accept an inescapable truth: one can never be truly happy until one makes peace with whatever is hidden away in the secret chambers of the heart.”

“There is wisdom in that, certainly.”

“I must hear how your story ends. Then I will tell you mine.”

“Very well. Five years ago, two things happened that made me take stock of my life. I turned fifty, and my father …” He started to say “passed away” again, but what Markov had just said made him reconsider. After keeping what had happened that night inside all these years, this might be the right time and place to unlock that secret chamber in his heart. Maybe finally talking about his father’s death would start to pull him out of the downward spiral his life had become since that night. “… my father was murdered.”

Hearing himself use the correct word roused him into plunging ahead with ruthless honesty. “We had gone to a horror movie on Halloween for our annual father/son birthday ritual. We’d gotten too old for costumes, but most of the audience was wearing one. The movie wasn’t very good, but we were old-school moviegoers. We never left our seats until the last credit disappeared from the screen.

“This particular night, one other person was still in the theater when we got up. Several rows back. A man wearing the same mask Michael Myers wore in
Halloween
. Just before we got to his row, he stepped into the aisle and blocked our path.” Despite his steely effort to maintain composure, a hollow sigh escaped. He gathered himself to say something he’d only said once before: on the witness stand. “He stabbed my father in the heart.”

Markov made a small groan. Quinn went on.

“At the trial, the killer said the rubber mask had actually been used in one of the
Halloween
movies. He had gotten it at an auction, and whenever he put it on, he claimed the spirit of Michael Myers got into him. A medical expert for the defense presented a very artfully constructed argument for his ‘personality disorder,’ but to me it was all just courtroom bullshit. There is only one explanation for something like that: pure wanton evil.”

Markov made a small shake of his head and closed his eyes. When he opened them, his eyes were filled with genuine sadness. “You have my condolences, Mr. Quinn. Something similar happened to me years ago. It ripped my family apart.”

“What happened?”

“That would be one dark tale too many for our first night together. I will let you finish yours, then we can move on to lighter matters. There will be time later to go digging into the secret chambers of my heart.”

Quinn nodded. “That night affected me profoundly. It was ironic, because even though my father loved horror, a generally amoral genre, he was a very moral man. He abhorred movies with no conscience, where evil went unpunished. He hated what he called the slice ’n’ dice movies that became fashionable in the ’70s, when filmmakers started trying to outdo each other with gratuitous buckets of gore and thinking up new ways to show the human body being mutilated.”

“Slasher films,” Markov said. “They started to show the things Tod had cut away from. Even in the pre-code days, you could only go so far.”

“Would he have shown it if he could?”

Markov considered the idea. “An interesting question. Knowing the sadistic paths his muse took him down, yes, I think he would.”

“I think you’re probably right. In any case, what happened that night made me think long and hard about my father’s keen sense of right and wrong—another of his traits he’d passed on to me. I decided that, if his death was going to have any meaning, I could no longer simply sit in the safe halls of academia, intellectualizing about fictional horrors, while watching those horrors becoming real enough to kill. It was time to see if there was a way to combat the evil he and I had spent so many hours lamenting.

“So, I quit teaching to become a consultant for law enforcement. Because of my background in folklore, my area of expertise became murder cases that had a ritual or occult aspect. Of which, sadly, not only has there been an endless supply, but the cases keep getting sicker and sicker. It’s a shocking eye-opener. I came to realize that evil is not just an abstract notion for academics to ponder. Evil
exists
. The impulse to commit the most appalling atrocities is
real
. No one knows where this impulse comes from, whether from within or without. All we know is that, every day, it overtakes countless human beings around the world to leave behind a trail of blood and death. I was hoping that a better understanding of what made people do these horrific things might be able to prevent some of them from happening. Might help to put the lid back on Pandora’s Box.”

“And has it?”

“Not to any noticeable degree. My last case was particularly appalling. A satanic cult making child-porn snuff films, where after the child was violated, the boy or girl was killed and offered up as a sacrifice.” Another despairing sigh escaped. “Just when you think it’s gotten as bad as it can get, it seems there’s always a deeper level of Hell.”

“Yet another thing we have in common.”

“What’s that?”

“Our journey into the deepest levels of Hell.”

Quinn couldn’t imagine a deeper level than satanic child porn. He started to say something about his Hell being real and Markov’s only being in the movies, but he wanted to steer the conversation away from the depressing turn it had taken. He had come here to pick the brain of a man who had to be a treasure trove of stories from Universal’s golden age of horror, not discuss the real-life horrors his work as a consultant made him desperately want to forget.

“Movies influencing behavior is far from new,” Markov said. “
London After Midnight
came out in 1927. The makeup Lon came up with for that part—especially that hideous rictus—scared people out of their wits. To the point where a man in London killed a woman, claiming he had a vision of Lon Chaney goading him into it.”

“I read about that case. He slashed her throat with a razor. But until recently, such cases were relatively rare. Now they’re all too common.”

“Life imitating art,” Markov said.

“Something like that. Be that as it may, my last case was so horrific I’m taking a hiatus. Trying to decide what I want to do with the rest of my life.”

The sound of a log rustling in the fireplace got their attention, and they turned to watch it slide off the grate amid a shower of sparks.

“It warms the body but not the soul,” Markov said.

Quinn glanced at his empty snifter. “Depends on the soul, I suppose. Some are harder to warm than others. In some of the killers I’ve seen, their soul had become a permanently frozen wasteland. If they ever had one.”

Markov swirled his brandy with an air of melancholy, then took a deliberate sip to savor its passage into his system. “So. You have given up on the horror film?”

“No, I still watch them, but not as much. Most of the newer ones are terrible, and I won’t watch the slice ’n’ dice ones. I don’t want to be repulsed. I want to be
scared
. When I get in the mood for a horror movie now, I usually just watch one of the old ones for the umpteenth time.”

“And yet you are bothered by their consequences for society. How do you reconcile those conflicting viewpoints?”

“They’re not reconcilable. I live with it by knowing I’ve at least tried to do something to stop human monsters.”